Hyundai Kona Electric long term update 3: the solar splash-and-dash

Look, to be honest, I thought I might enjoy having an EV parked in the driveway for a few months, and I knew for sure it would make my wife happy – which is obviously far more important than how I might feel about it – but I didn’t expect it to change my life.

It’s not that the Hyundai Kona Electric has turned me into a total EV-angelist, but I’m not far off, particularly when it comes to second cars. Some years ago I got to go to Norway, back when only around half of all the new cars sold in the country were electric, and I made a point of asking locals how they felt about the whole electric switchover and how it worked for them, in real life.

UPDATE 1: Hyundai Kona Electric long term review: Getting a home petrol station
UPDATE 2: Hyundai Kona Electric long term review update 2: Meeting the EV family

What a lot of people said, kind of on the down low, was that, in actual fact, while just about everyone had an EV by then, almost all of them also had an older ICE vehicle as well. This gave them the ability to enjoy the best of both worlds.

For most of them, most of the time, an EV was perfect, with plenty of range for the kind of driving that actually defines the majority of car use – short trips and commuting. But parked behind that EV, almost hidden if possible, was an old-school car that was only brought out very rarely, for longer journeys.

What I have discovered over the past few months is just how well the Kona works for my family in that way. Short journeys, shopping runs, getting the teenager to school when his bus doesn’t show up, all these add up to maybe 80km a week, which means, in turn, that I only really need to charge the Hyundai up once a fortnight, or even less.

This has been a bit of a revelation, frankly, the reality of living with an electric car. Everyone who sees it asks about charging, “but how, but where, but how often?” And the answer turns out to be, not that often at all.

Now, to be fair, if we were using it for commuting, things would obviously be different – I’m about 10km from the city – but with working from home still largely the go, that has not been an issue.

The other very noticeable change in my behaviour, since I had my solar panels installed, is that I’ve become obsessed with the weather.

When it is sunny, and the sun is high in the sky, I start pondering whether it’s worth the solar equivalent of a splash and dash. What I have realised is that the car pulls so much power out of the system that I can only make more amps than it requires when the solar system is on full song.

So, rather than charge the car when it’s empty and wait the eight to 10 hours it would take for a full whack, I just do two hours on sunny days, leave it a few days, and do another couple. If we were going to use the Kona EV for a long trip – which I wouldn’t, as we always have access to an ICE second car for those – it would be a different story, but the fact is there’s always between 180 and 280km of range showing on the dash, and it’s been a long time since I saw the full 484km of WLTP range figure displayed.

For inner-city living, that level of charging, and range, isn’t necessary. Instead, I can manage my use of solar and monitoring of the panels’ output to run the Hyundai entirely on sunlight. When you consider it, that’s a fairly magical thing, and it has turned me into a bit of bore about the subject. As I tell people, incessantly, it’s not the money it’s saving me so much as just the pure joy of knowing that I’m running a car on sun beams and producing no CO2 at all, which, for someone with a carbon footprint as gargantuan as mine, feels miraculous.

And just to show you how fast things are changing, this week I’m going to plug my wall box and its sun power – making a me a kind of Sun God, now I think about it – into a very different beast indeed; an electric Harley-Davidson. But that’s a story for next time.